Blame My Shelf

Prescribing a morning-after pill in A&E. The patient says, "I slept with three guys last night. Will one pill be enough?" I can’t have been the only person to assume that when you are waiting 5 hours in A&E, it is undoubtedly due to one of the doctors polishing his solid gold bust and deciding which shade of suede he is going to order his Ferrari in. Whilst this is of course, an exaggeration, as we are all aware of the enormous pressures that the NHS is under, but there is that niggling sentiment lying dormant. Adam Kay opens the door to the surgical ward, specifically the gynaecology ward where he delivered thousands of babies and worked for inhumanly long stretches – I’m not sure I’ve ever been awake for 24 hours, let alone worked that many in a row. Tales of working the morning of your wedding because you can’t get the time off, and weekly working hours clocking in the region of three numbers, inevitable relationship breakdown and hardship beyond what I h...

The Party by Elizabeth Day The Party surrounds scholarship and bullied pupil Martin, who befriends the magnetising aristocratic Adonis Ben. Their lives intertwine, from school to University and there is something Martin witnesses there that changes both of their lives, and forces them closer. Years later we are then witness to their reunion intermittently between vignettes from Martin’s perspective of the past. Ben’s party becomes the catalyst for decade long resentments and palpable tension, between Ben and Martin, but also Lucy, Martin’s wife, towards both Martin and Ben. When champagne flutes are given, looks are passed, betrayals are made, and thinly guised grievances rear their heads. Horrors that lay in Martin’s childhood are juxtaposed with Ben’s summer’s spent swimming in the lake on his estate. I flipped through the pages ferociously, where Martin’s obsession with Ben results in him presenting himself as a substitute to the family for their dead son, and the claustrophobic...

Perhaps this is more suggestive of my lack of research into a book before I have added it to my basket and frantically searching for my card details, but I was unaware that Derren Brown of Happy, was the Derren Brown of magician-TV-fame. However, you quickly realise that his psychological experiments and magic hiding behind clever psychology, it becomes natural that Brown would wish to interlink the fields of psychology and philosophy and delve into the depths of what happiness is, and how and whether we might find it. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that his “celebrity status” did not subtract from the reading of the book. It became clear that Happy, is a fantastic book that happened to be written by a celebrity, rather than a celebrity who has sat down to write a book. Brown writes eloquently with a clear style, and has written an interesting book with an interesting style and concept. This has to be applauded aside from Derren Brown of TV fame. Brown runs through th...

Incredibly charming. It really was. However…it was charming in the same way that I find Disney’s new releases of actor led classics. If you were to watch the films, they are undeniably delightful, but ultimately you are aware of how Cinderella ends before it even begins. The tale follows Anthony Peardew, a now ageing man who in his youth lost his fiancée tragically the same day he lost her keepsake, and from there on he harbours all lost items he finds with the intention to reunite the objects with their owners. On Anthony’s death this task is passed on to his housekeeper Laura, a woman whose age is potentially alluded to too often,   who takes on the task with the aid of Freddy the gardener and Sunshine, a teenage local girl with down syndrome. With a sprinkling of ghostly happenings and Sunshine’s ghostly intuition, the novel of course reaches a happy ever after. The narrative is interwoven with stories explaining the history of the lost objects. First of all, the ...

This is another book that was not as simple as my predictions. The blurb discusses a woman who leads a simple, monotonous and empty 9-5 and compensates with a vodka fuelled weekend. From this, I assumed that this would be an ‘Animals’ esque, heavy drinking novel, with Lena Dunham style characterisation. I assumed that the protagonist would overcome her demons by finding something more meaningful in life (and in predictable fashion; a boyfriend to sew it all up nicely). A fraction of this assumption was correct, although it is more comparable to The Rosie Project than the sordid encounters of the beautiful people in Skins. However – charming Skins is not, and Eleanor Oliphant certainly does possess charm. In opposition of being drug and party fuelled, Eleanor’s life is charged only by loneliness, and Honeyman creates the interesting angle of what it is like to be young and lonely, something seldom explored. Essentially, Eleanor witnesses the fall of an elderly man, and her ass...